Reader's disease
Reader's disease is an occupational hazard of editors and literary
critics. Critics are always looking for the hidden meaning, the
clever symbol, and, since they are always looking for it, they always
find it, whether it was there or not. (Discordians will recognize
this as a special case of the law of fives.) Sometimes the
critics are brilliant, and find hidden meanings that are undoubtedly
there even though the author was unaware of them; more often, they are
less fortunate, and sometimes they even make fools of themselves.

The idea of reader's disease was introduced to me by professor David
Porush, who illustrated it with the following anecdote. Nathaniel
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is prefaced by an
introduction called The Custom-House, in which the
narrator claims to have found documentation of Hester Prynne's story
in the custom house where he works. The story itself is Hawthorne's
fantasy, but the custom house is not; Hawthorne did indeed work in a
custom house for many years.

Porush's anecdote concerned Mary Rudge, the daughter of Ezra Pound.
Rudge, reading the preface of The Scarlet Letter, had a
brilliant insight: the custom house, like so many other buildings of
the era, was a frame house and was built in the shape of the letter
"A". It therefore stands as a physical example of the eponymous letter.

Rudge was visiting Porush in the United States, and told him about her
discovery.

"That's a great theory," said Porush, "But it doesn't look anything
like a letter 'A'."

Rudge argued the point.

"Mary," said Porush, "I've seen it. It's a
box."

Rudge would not be persuaded, so together they got in Porush's car and
drove to Salem, Massachusetts, where the custom house itself still
stands.

But Rudge, so enamored of her theory that she could not abandon
it, concluded that some alternative explanation must be
true: the old custom house had burnt down and been rebuilt, or the one
in the book was not based on the real one that Hawthorne had worked
in, or Porush had led her to the wrong building.

But anyway, all that is just to introduce my real point, which is to
relate one of the most astounding examples of reader's disease I have
ever encountered personally. The Mary Rudge story is secondhand; for
all I know Porush made it up, or exaggerated, or I got the details
wrong. But this example I am about to show you is in print, and is
widely available.

I have a nice book called
The Treasury of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which
is a large and delightful collection of excerpts from past editions of the
Britannica, edited by Clifton Fadiman. This is out of print now, but
it was published in 1992 and is easy to come by.

Each extract is accompanied by some introductory remarks by Fadiman
and sometimes by one of the contributing editors. One long section in
the book concerns early articles about human flight; in the Second
Edition (published 1778-1783) there was an article on "Flying" by then
editor James Tytler. Contributing editor Bruce L. Felknor's
remarks include the following puzzled query:

What did Tytler mean by his interjection of "Fa" after Friar Bacon's
famous and fanciful claim that man had already succeeded in flying?
It hardly seems a credulous endorsement, an attitude sometimes
attributed to Tytler.

Fadiman adds his own comment on this:

As for Tytler's "Fa": Could it have been an earlier version of our
"Faugh!"? In any case we suddenly hear an unashamed human voice.

Gosh, what could Tytler have meant by this curious interjection? A
credulous endorsement? An exclamation of disgust? An unedited
utterance of the unashamed human voice? Let's have a look:

The secret consisted in a couple of large thin hollow copper-globes
exhausted of air; which being much lighter than air, would sustain a
chair, whereon a person might sit. Fa. Francisco Lana, in his
Prodromo, proposes the same thing...

Felknor and Fadiman have mistaken "Fa" for a complete sentence.
But it is apparently an abbreviation of Father Francisco Lana's
ecclesiastical title.